The Reformation: A History By Diarmaid MacCulloch Penguin Books, 2005 When Protestants celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation last year, we weren’t the only ones cheering. Other celebrants included cheerleaders of the modern secular state. This may seem...

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that original sin was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” His thinking here is that we are not confronted every day with virgin births or resurrections, but the evidence of human frailty is all around us. In the...

Vice President Mike Pence is one heartbeat, or resignation, away from the top job. But with Trump’s robust health and seeming immunity to the effects of scandals that would have sunk a normal presidency, Pence’s accession is unlikely–certainly not unless the...

Like a sniper in a war zone, Stephen Paddock found a defensible position 400 yards from his target, and set to waging his little war on the Route 91 Harvest music fest in the early morning hours of October 1. From the killing fields of the darkened concert ground it...

A Christian’s Introduction to David Foster Wallace, Part 1 When I read the Parable of the Sower, I often feel like the young plant sown among thorns. I am beset every day precisely by the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches, not so much the...

A Church for the Next Generation, Part Three In the past two posts, we’ve looked at whether young people are going to church less, and why some young people leave the church. Now I want to answer another why question: if the church is as stuffy and old-fashioned as...

The world was made for us. It’s a comforting idea, isn’t it? And for many thousands of years, humans believed it was true. Our ancestors looked up at the sky and saw a bright yellow ball which lit our days and warmed our skin. There were plants and animals for us to...

Part two in the series “A Church for the Next Generation” In my last post, I took a quick look at church attendance among young people and concluded that the fear-mongering about young people leaving the church was wrong and misplaced. For example, I showed that the...

Post One in the series “A Church for the Next Generation” The church, we are told, is graying rapidly. Churches in rural areas are shrinking as Americans migrate to the cities, while churches in urban areas are not the bastions of ethnic and religious solidarity they...

At a “Celebrate Freedom Rally,” at the Kennedy Center in D.C. earlier this week, the First Baptist Church of Dallas choir premiered a new song. It’s called “Make America Great Again,” and it riffs off the campaign slogan of America’s 45th president. You can watch the...

“Sir, I have to tell you that I do have a firearm on me.” These were almost the last words of Philando Castile’s life. Castile was driving with his girlfriend and their daughter on the night of 6 July, 2016, when two officers stopped him in a Minnesota suburb due to a...

If you haven’t heard the term “Intersectionality,” it probably doesn’t seem important. The study of traffic intersections? Yawn. But intersectionality is actually a new development in the history of feminism and class and gender studies that has wide-ranging...

After the election on June 8, millions of Britons woke up and scratched their heads. Though it was the third exhausting nationwide vote in three years, with millions of new voters casting their ballots for the first time, the result was…inconclusive. Theresa May...

You’re eighteen years old, single, and pregnant, and you’re keeping your baby. I am proud of you. Before we go any further, I just want to say: you go, girl. I want to support you in any way that I can. I want the church to support you in every way that it can. But. I...

There is a certain schadenfreude in watching the missteps of countries other than our own. This year in particular, I have been drawn to events outside the morass of American politics. But ours is not the only democracy that seems sometimes to be heading hellwards in...

Remember when Trump was supposed to be “our boy?” He won a plurality of the vote among American evangelicals. Our portion of American society clearly thought he was worth casting a vote for. But now, with a new Trump scandal every five minutes, it’s worth revisiting...

Of the many myths about church attendance in the United States, one of the most enduring is that “educated people are too smart to go to church.” Our system of education, which has been so effectively secularized, is not expected to create committed Christians, and...

During the last election cycle, even up through the first half of election night, every major media outlet predicted a comfortable victory for Hillary Clinton. Here you can see one much-referenced election calculator, timed out like a broken stopwatch, displaying the...